light to cross the fields to listen to this funeral dirge of the reason. In spite of the poverty and rudeness of his life the depths of his nature were unclouded. He could feel intensely, and his imagination was quick to respond to the touch of mystery.

CHAPTER III

ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S EARLY OPPORTUNITIES THE BOOKS
HE READ TRIPS TO NEW
MADE ON HIS FRIENDS

ORLEANS-IMPRESSION

HE

WITH all his hard living and hard work, Lincoln was getting, in this period, a desultory kind of education. Not that he received much schooling. He went to school " by littles," he says; "in all it did not amount to more than a year." And, if we accept his own description of the teachers, it was, perhaps, just as well that it was only "by littles." No qualification was required of a teacher beyond "readin', writin,' and cipherin' to the rule of three." If a straggler supposed to know Latin happened to sojourn in the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a "wizard." But more or less of a school-room is a matter of small importance if a boy has learned to read, and to think of what he reads. And that, this boy had learned. His stock of books was small, but he knew them thoroughly, and they were good books to know; the Bible, "Æsop's Fables," "Robinson Crusoe," Bunyan's "Pilgrim Progress," a "History of the United States," Weems's "Life of Washington," and the "Statutes of Indiana."* These are the chief

*The first authorized sketch of Lincoln's life was written by the late John L. Scripps of the Chicago "Tribune," who went to Springfield at Mr. Lincoln's request, and by him was furnished the data for a campaign biography. In a letter written to Mr. Herndon after the death of Lincoln, which Herndon turned over to me, Scripps relates that in writing his book he stated that Lincoln as a youth read Plutarch's "Lives." This he did simply because, as a rule, every boy in the West in the early days did read Plutarch. When the advance sheets of the book reached Mr. Lincoln, he sent for the author and said, gravely: "That paragraph wherein you state that I read Plutarch's Lives' was not true when you wrote it, for up to that moment in my life I had never seen that early contribution to human history; but I want your book, even if it is

ones we know about. Some of these books he borrowed from the neighbors; a practice which resulted in at least one casualty, for Weems's "Life of Washington" he allowed to get wet, and to make good the loss he had to pull fodder three days. No matter. The book became his then, and he could read it as he would. Fortunately he took this curious work in profound seriousness, which a wide-awake boy would hardly be expected to do to-day. Washington became an exalted figure in his imagination; and he always contended later, when the question of the real character of the first President was brought up, that it was wiser to regard him as a godlike being, heroic in nature and deeds, as Weems does, than to contend that he was only a man who, if wise and good, still made mistakes and was guilty of follies, like other men.

Besides these books he borrowed many others. He once told a friend that he "read through every book he had ever heard of in that country, for a circuit of fifty miles." From everything he read he made long extracts, with his turkeybuzzard pen and brier-root ink. When he had no paper he would write on a board, and thus preserve his selections until he secured a copybook. The wooden fire-shovel was his usual slate, and on its back he ciphered with a charred stick shaving it off when it had become too grimy for use. The logs and boards in his vicinity he covered with his figures and quotations. By night he read and worked as long as there was light, and he kept a book in the crack of the logs in his loft, to have it at hand at peep of day. When acting as ferryman on the Ohio, in his nineteenth year, anxious, no doubt, to get through the books of the house where he boarded, before he left the place, he read every night until midnight.

nothing more than a campaign sketch, to be faithful to the facts; and in order that the statement might be literally true, I secured the book a few weeks ago, and have sent for you to tell you that I have just read it through."-Jesse W. Weik.